Brian Hugh Murray

H.M. Stanley, David Livingstone, and the Staging of 'Anglo-Saxon' Manliness

ABSTRACT This article examines the portrayal of the meeting between the Scottish missionary David Livingstone and the Welsh-American journalist Henry Morton Stanley in Stanleys popular travelogue How I Found Livingstone (1872). In order to represent the meeting as emblematic of a new transatlantic ‘Anglo-Saxon’ fellowship, Stanley was forced to elide his own Welsh and Celtic identity. In Stanleys account of the meeting, the journalists devotion to an Anglo-Saxon ideal of emotional propriety is further dramatised through Stanleys ambiguous status as both expressive author and repressed protagonist. The protagonists battle to resist the ‘unmanning’ powers of sentiment becomes a bathetic role-play, a sentimental ploy that gives the narrative its affective power. The article analyses Stanleys ambivalent attitude to his own Celtic and Welsh identity and suggests that he also deliberately plays down Livingstones Scottishness. By using the ‘peripheral’ space of Central Africa to delineate a mode of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ manliness in response to specific political problems, Stanley ultimately gestures towards the strategies and ideologies of a new transnational mode of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ empire.

Building Congo, Writing Empire: The Literary Labours of Henry Morton Stanley

The Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley was one of the most important figures in the foundation and early development of the Congo Free State. But he was also the most consistently popular European travel writer of the late nineteenth century, and his bestselling accounts of African expeditions did much to foster the ‘myth of the Dark Continent’. These adventures were characterized by dramatic and violent encounters with ‘natives’ and fleeting impressions of the flora and fauna of Central Africa. Stanley’s preferred formula was a sensational quest towards an ostensible goal: the ‘finding’ of Livingstone or the search for the sources of the Nile. His Congo and the Founding of its Free State (1885) offered something ostensibly more prosaic: a ‘story of work and exploration’. While Stanley’s book was received with enthusiasm by many, the markedly ‘European’ nature of the project also presented problems. His famous search for Livingstone and his subsequent ‘Anglo-American’ expedition across equatorial Africa had been funded by the British and American press and both missions hailed as the exclusive achievements of the ‘Anglo-Saxon race’. But now Stanley was exploring and working for the Francophone King of the Belgians. This article argues that Stanley explicitly presents his literary productions (journalism, travel writing, and lectures) as an important part of the work of exploration and empire building.

‘Primitive Man’ and Media Time in H.M. Stanley’s Through the Dark Continent

The Welsh-American explorer and journalist Henry Morton Stanley (1841–1904) did more than most to promote what Patrick Brantlinger has called ‘the myth of the Dark Continent’.1 He was not the originator of the idea that sub-Saharan Africa was a region perpetually devoid of physical, spiritual and technological ‘light’; however, he did his best to perpetuate this notion in a series of murkily-titled volumes, including Through the Dark Continent (1878), In Darkest Africa (1890) and My Dark Companions (1893). When Marlow, the narrator of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), describes his own expedition into the African interior as like ‘travelling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings’, he is tapping into an extremely well-worn literary cliche which had been part of the European travel writer’s tool-kit since the Middle Ages.2 In his Philosophy of History (1837), Hegel described Africa as ‘the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night’.3 Thus the absence of figurative light in Darkest Africa was intimately connected with the perceived dearth of African history. To a culture like that of Victorian Britain, which obsessively defined itself racially and culturally through shared historical narratives, this absence was particularly damning.

The Battle for St Peter’s Chair: Mediating the Materials of Catholic Antiquity in Nineteenth-Century Britain

Abstract This article explores how one object—the alleged papal throne of St Peter in the Vatican—became a battleground for Protestant and Catholic readings of the early history of Christianity in Britain and Ireland. For many progressive Protestants, archaeology provided the long-sought-after scientific and material vindication of the authority of scripture. But critical analysis of scripture and historical texts could either authenticate or discredit sacred things. As tangible traces of Catholic apostolic authority, the material remains of early Roman Christianity provoked much religious, moral, and political debate in nineteenth-century Britain. This article discusses how these debates were mediated in popular print and visual culture in Britain and Ireland by examining a widely publicized pamphlet debate between the English Cardinal Nicholas Wiseman and the Irish novelist Sydney Owenson (Lady Morgan). Although this was a debate about the theological authority exerted by the material remains of the past, the battle over Peter’s chair was conducted exclusively in the realm of word and image through exegesis and illustration.

Introduction: Forms of Travel, Modes of Transport

In her 1927 essay ‘Street Haunting: A London Adventure’, Virginia Woolf wanders into a second-hand bookshop on Charing Cross Road. A disorganised stack of volumes piled on the floor offers a panoramic view of the print culture of the previous century. Although scholars of the nineteenth century have long thought of the novel as the dominant literary form of the period, Woolf suggests that it is another category —the travel book —that overwhelms all others. There are travellers … row upon row of them, still testifying, indomitable spinsters that they were, to the discomforts that they endured and the sunsets they admired in Greece when Queen Victoria was a girl. A tour in Cornwall with a visit to the tin mines was then worthy of voluminous record. People went slowly up the Rhine and did portraits of each other in Indian ink, sitting reading on deck beside a coil of rope; they measured the pyramids; were lost to civilization for years; converted negroes in pestilential swamps. This packing up and going off, exploring deserts and catching fevers, settling in India for a lifetime, penetrating even to China and then returning to lead a parochial life in Edmonton, tumbles and tosses upon the dusty floor like an uneasy sea, so restless the English are, with the waves at their very door.1